Building Topic Clusters for SEO

Want to turn your website into a lead-generating machine? 

Having a blog is a fantastic way to showcase your expertise to prospective customers while boosting your search visibility.

However, coming up with fresh content ideas all the time can be tricky. 

That’s where topic clusters can help. By organizing your content into interconnected hubs of expertise, you’ll generate endless article ideas and create a website architecture that search engines will love.

In this article, I’ll explain what topic clustering is, how to use pillar pages and topic clusters together, and how to choose the right clusters for your target audience.

Key Takeaways

• By linking related subtopics to a central pillar page, content clusters improve site structure and user navigation.
• Content clusters help search engines understand the depth and breadth of your expertise on a particular topic.
• Content clusters boost SEO by increasing keyword relevance and enhancing topical authority.
• Topic clusters allow you to target multiple related keywords, driving more organic traffic to your site.
• Effective internal linking within content clusters helps search engines index your content more thoroughly and rank it higher.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Are Topic Clusters?
  • What Is an Example of a Topic Cluster?
• Why Topic Clusters Matter for SEO
• How to Create a Topic Cluster
  • 1. Choose Your Main Topic
  • 2. Do Topical Keyword Research
  • 3. Identify Your Pillar Pages and Subpages
  • 4. Optimize Existing Content
  • 5. Create New Content to Fill Gaps
  • 6. Connect Everything with Internal Links
• Monitoring and Tracking Performance
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Are Topic Clusters?

A topic cluster is a group of connected pages on a website.

They consist of a page on a core topic, known as a pillar page, and a group of subpages (aka cluster pages). The pillar page links out to the related cluster pages, and the cluster pages link back to the pillar page.

This strategy is sometimes called “hub and spoke,” with the pillar page acting as the “hub” and the clusters acting as the “spokes.”

Say you run a home decor business and create a long-form pillar page called “Home Decor Trends for 2025.” This page acts as a comprehensive guide, linking to five cluster pages that provide more information:

• Color Trends for 2025
• Furniture Trends for 2025
• Material Trends for 2025
• Lighting Trends for 2025
• Interior Design Styles for 2025

While pillar pages and topic clusters most often pair with blog content, you can use them in other ways, too. For example, they can help group product or service pages together or organize knowledge base content.

What Is an Example of a Topic Cluster?

The great thing about topic clustering is that you can use it no matter what you sell or your industry. 

Here are some examples of topic clusters to inspire you.

This step-by-step guide to moving into a new house by Propertyable covers everything from deciding whether to move and how to sell your current home to getting the keys to your new home. It has more than 20 internal links to relevant articles that provide more information about the process.

Babbel has lots of comprehensive guides to learning languages. This page about learning Spanish is more than 7,000 words long and talks about the benefits of speaking Spanish and which countries use it. It signposts readers to valuable resources to help them on their linguistic journey.

I also use topic clusters to offer extra value to readers of my blog. For example, my guide to SEO provides an overview of what SEO is alongside links that discuss specific aspects of SEO in more detail.

Why Topic Clusters Matter for SEO

Topic clusters are your secret weapon in SEO.

For starters, they allow you to rank for more keywords, improving your search engine presence.

They also help you build more topical authority—a measure of your site’s expertise on a specific subject.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are critical ranking signals to search engines like Google. Demonstrating E-E-A-T in your content shows that you’re a credible, reliable source of information that visitors will find valuable. As a result, you’re more likely to rank higher.

Here’s how Google’s search rater guidelines explain E-E-A-T:

Another SEO benefit of topic clusters is that they help the search engines understand the semantic relationships between your pages. 

Semantic relationships refer to the connection between words and concepts. Essentially, this gives search engines more context about your site, increasing the chances of appearing in relevant search results.

How to Create a Topic Cluster

Now that you know how pillar pages and topic clusters work, how do you create them? 

Here’s my step-by-step guide to deciding what to write about and creating content that gets the right results.

1. Choose your main topic.
2. Do topical keyword research.
3. Identify your pillar pages and subpages.
4. Optimize your existing content.
5. Create new content to fill gaps.
6. Connect everything with internal links.

1. Choose Your Main Topic

The first step in creating good SEO topic clusters is to brainstorm broad, high-level topics to write about. This will help shape your pillar page and provide many topic cluster ideas.

Your topic should be something:

• That’s relevant to your business.
• That you have knowledge and experience in.
• That you can create several pieces of content about.
• That’s of interest to your target audience.

Let’s go back to our home decor business from earlier in the article. A good example of a topic you would have the experience to write about could be how to style your home on a budget. 

From there, you could further showcase E-E-A-T with subtopics focusing on specific rooms (e.g., living room, bathroom, kitchen) or specific techniques for scoring budget-friendly décor (e.g., thrifting, Facebook Marketplace shopping).

2. Do Topical Keyword Research

Once you have a main topic idea, it’s time to conduct detailed keyword research. The keywords you choose will steer the topic clusters you create. 

To get the best results, choose high-traffic keywords that your target audience searches for. Look at your emails, live chat logs, and social media messages to get a feel for the words and phrases your customers use. 

Keyword research tools, like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, or Semrush, can also help you identify keyword ideas.

As you research and identify your keywords, think about keyword intent—the underlying reason why someone is searching for a specific word or phrase. 

Are people looking for information or ready to buy from you right now? Getting search intent right will ensure your page visitors take the right action after reading your content.

Earlier, I mentioned writing about “how to style your home on a budget.” Let’s use AnswerThePublic, which uses autocomplete data from search engines like Google and Bing, to uncover what people are asking online.

Here’s a keyword idea with a healthy search volume that AnswerThePublic gave me: “budget home decor stores.” It makes for a great keyword with the potential to be a topic cluster page title.

3. Identify Your Pillar Pages and Subpages

Once you’ve got a list of potential keywords, determine what your pillar page will be about and which topic cluster pages will support it.

How many topic cluster pages should you create per pillar page? It depends on the topic you’re writing about and how much detail you want to go into.

I’d recommend between four to eight cluster pages per pillar page as a starting point, but you might need more or fewer. Quality is always better than quantity. It’s better to have a handful of well-researched, authoritative pages than hundreds of low-quality ones.

Sticking with our topic of “how to style your home on a budget,” some subpages might look like this:

Pillar page: 

• How to Style Your Home on a Budget

Subpages:

• Tips for Revamping Your Bedroom Decor Without Breaking the Bank
• Upstyle Your Kitchen with These 10 Budget-Friendly Accessories
• Scoring Deals at Budget Home Décor Stores
• DIY Wall Art Ideas to Liven Up Your Living Room
• Styling Shelves on a Budget

Once you have your topic clusters, assign the keywords you’ve identified to each cluster. You can then optimize your content for these keywords to rank in the search engines.

4. Optimize Existing Content

When creating topic clusters, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You might already have content on your website you can adapt and use as subpages, saving time and resources.

Another bonus is that your existing content might already have pre-existing backlinks, improving your chances of ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Here’s what to do to optimize your existing content for topic clustering:

• Add your chosen keywords to your page copy, title, meta description, subheadings, image alt tags, and URL.
• Make your content more readable with bullet points, subheadings, and paragraph breaks.
• Revise your copy so it’s clear and jargon-free.
• Review your existing internal links and add new ones as appropriate.
• Add relevant images and videos.
• Place a relevant call to action (CTA) at the end of the page.

Don’t forget to link your subpage to your pillar page—and vice versa.

5. Create New Content to Fill Gaps

If your website doesn’t have existing pages you can use in your topic cluster strategy, you’ll need to create fresh pages.

How long should your pillar pages and topic clusters be? Make them as long as they need to be to provide value to your target audience. As a general rule of thumb, though, your pillar page will be longer than the subpages it links to. Pillar pages are often anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 words.

I’d recommend starting with your pillar page. That way, you can get a feel for where the links to your topic clusters will go. You might even get inspiration for brand-new subpages as you write. 

Don’t forget that your pillar pages and topic clusters aren’t just about the words. Think about incorporating other content, too. Videos, infographics, and interactive elements can make your pages more engaging.

6. Connect Everything with Internal Links

Once you’ve created your pillar pages and topic clusters, it’s time to connect everything together.

Internal linking helps search engines crawl your content and guides page visitors toward other pages in your topic cluster.

Here are some expert tips for making the most of your internal linking:

• Space your internal links through your article—this makes them easier to read and click on, especially on mobile.
• Make sure your anchor text (the clickable text in your link) is clear and contextual. Keep it between two and five words long.
• If your pillar page is long, jump links (links that take visitors to another part of the same page) can make your page easier to navigate.
• Do your internal linking after you’ve written all your content. You might miss out on linking opportunities if you do it as you go—I speak from experience here!

Remember that broken links can frustrate readers and negatively affect your SEO. Regularly check your internal links to make sure they still work. Additionally, if you change the URL of a specific page, put a redirect in place.

Monitoring and Tracking Performance

It’s essential to measure the effectiveness of your topic clusters to ensure they’re ranking well in the search engine results and your site visitors find them useful.

That way, if your pillar pages and topic clusters aren’t doing as well as you expected, you can take steps to make them better. You can also refresh or optimize top-performing pages to help them rank even higher.

I recommend measuring the following metrics:

• Organic traffic. How many visitors visit your page from the search engine results?
• Search engine rankings. Where is your page ranking in the search engine results?
• Time spent on site. How long do visitors spend on your site after visiting your page?
• Pages per visit. How many pages do visitors read before leaving your site?
• Number of returning visitors. How many visitors come back to your site to read your content?
• Conversion rate. How many visitors convert on your site after visiting your page?

You can track the success of your SEO topic clusters using Google Analytics and your rank-tracking tool of choice—Ubersuggest is great for this.

FAQs

What are topic clusters?

A topic cluster is a collection of connected pages on a website. 

It consists of one core page (a pillar page) that links to related cluster pages. These cluster pages link back to the pillar page.

How to create topic clusters

The six steps to creating high-quality SEO topic clusters are:

Add internal links to connect everything together.

Identify what you want to write about.

Carry out thorough keyword research.

Determine which pillar pages and topic clusters to create.

Amend existing content to support your topic clusters.

Create new, SEO-optimized content.

It’s also important to track your topic clusters’ performance to make sure they’re effective.

Why are topic clusters important?

Topic clustering is important because:

It encourages visitors to spend more time on your website.

It allows you to rank for more keywords.

It helps you showcase your expertise in a chosen subject.

It provides the search engines with additional context about the relationship between your pages.

Conclusion

Topic clusters don’t just make it easier to come up with content ideas for your website. They can help boost your rankings in Google, too.

This means more organic traffic, increased engagement, and more sales.

Let me leave you with one final tip: If you’re not sure where to begin with topic clustering, take a look at the content your competitors create. 

This can help you identify gaps in your content and create pillar pages and topic clusters that help you stay ahead in the search engine results.

Now, go out there and start building topic clusters that propel your website to the top of the search results.